Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram and, more recently, co-founder of personalized news app Artifact (which TechCrunch parent company Yahoo recently acquired), joins Anthropic as the company’s first director of product.
As CPO, Krieger will oversee Anthropic’s engineering, management and product design efforts, says Anthropic, as the company works to expand its suite of AI applications and offer Claude, its generative AI technology, to a wider audience. In addition to consumer-focused projects like the recently launched Claude mobile app, Krieger is also responsible for Anthropic’s enterprise services, subscriptions and software.
“I have long admired Anthropic’s relentless effort to create capable and reliable AI systems that empower humans and expand what is possible through technology,” Krieger said in a statement. “I’m excited to join the exceptional team at Anthropic and partner with them to design and scale transformative products like Claude. The potential for AI to positively impact the world is immense, and I believe Anthropic has the talent, principles, and technology to help realize that potential.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei added: “Mike is a world-class engineer, builder and leader. His experience developing intuitive products and user experiences will be invaluable as we create new ways for people to interact with Claude, especially in the workplace. We feel fortunate to add Mike’s vision and expertise to our leadership team.
Krieger — along with Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s other co-founder — left Instagram in 2018, several years after Meta (then Facebook) acquired the social media platform for $1 billion. He and Systrom partnered to launch Artifact in January 2023 with the goal of developing recommendation systems to aggregate and suggest news articles, topics, and authors and enable the broader community to like and comment this content.
Artefact had initially announced that it would cease operations in early 2024, but, in April, it was acquired by Yahoo! for an undisclosed amount. Krieger worked alongside Systrom in an “advisor” capacity after the acquisition; this work is finished, it seems.
Kriger’s hiring comes days after Anthropic rival OpenAI showed off a more conversational, polished experience for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform, and after Google previewed major upgrades to its Gemini chatbot technology at the tech giant’s I/O developers conference. Anthropic, it seems, also wants to aggressively go after the consumer market – and thinks Krieger is the right person to do it.
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